“Can you imagine the kind of cold calls we had to make in the beginning?” says Warinner. “‘Hi, I’m working with this thing on teeth, and it’s about 1,000 years old, and it has blue stuff in it. Can you help me?’ People thought we were crazy. We tried reaching out to physicists, and they were like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ We tried reaching out to people working in art restoration, and they were like, ‘Why are you working with plaque?’” She eventually reached physicists at the University of York who helped confirm the blue did indeed come from the mineral lazurite, derived from lapis lazuli.
Why were some of the people that they were asking not interested in the discovery? Were they unaware of the significance that they were aware of? It is interesting to me that they got these kinds of reactions, especially since their findings are quite interesting. Not to mention that there were at least some physicists that got it, as mentioned at the end of the paragraph. Why did others think they were crazy? Did the University of York physicists just have higher interest, or more knowledge about the importance of this discovery?